Mass Effect 3 - Review Roundup # 2

The overall presentation in Mass Effect 3 is the best we've seen out of BioWare yet. From the deep booms of explosions to the digital noise sound of Reapers and on to the wonderful soundtrack and spot-on voice acting, the game sounds simply amazing. The architecture and design are wonderful, and I want to give a special shout-out to BioWare for finally fleshing out the Citadel enough to make it truly stand alongside other great science fiction mainstays, like the Death Star or Serenity. Now, I'm finally confident that a future spin-off game taking place entirely on the Citadel could be a huge success.

The multiplayer is a cooperative survival mode – you and your friends pick a class and fight off waves of enemies. It’s not switched on at the time of writing, so I can’t tell you how that plays beyond what you can try for yourself in the demo. But the way it affects the main game is needlessly problematic. In singleplayer, everything you do accumulates ‘war assets’. When you finish the game, how many of these you have determines how good an ending you get: how well the final fight goes for your side. Success in co-op multiplies your war assets, up to twice their normal value. That means that if you only play singleplayer, or want to finish singleplayer first, you’ll have to grind the living hell out of its most tedious fetch quests to get the best ending.

A quote from the review's conclusion:

Shepard is the best game character I’ve ever played. She’s been an ongoing improv collaboration between me and BioWare to build a hero that works for their plot, but suits my tastes. Since we composed her first inspiring speech to the crew when she took charge of the Normandy, a commanding, brutally effective woman has emerged through 60 hours of tough decisions………But she has also formed conflicted, quiet, sometimes touching relationships with some of the alien weirdos dragged along on her mission. Relationships that gave her character a gentler side I didn’t expect, but which made sense of the person I had in my head.

1. A little faith
Fulfilled: yes!
We were frustrated, then incredulous, then just kind of bored of people not believing the Reapers were real. For a long time, BioWare said Mass Effect 3 would start with you on trial for killing thousands of Batarians to stop the Reaper’s arrival, because people were still sceptical the Reapers were coming. They changed that, thank God. You’ve been discharged for “the shit you’ve done,” as Anderson puts it – which to be honest is fair enough.
The Reapers are everywhere. No-one doubts it. And as a result, working with the various races to rally them together is a much less frustrating process.

The conclusion from this article:

That’s 11 of our 15 wishes fulfilled – pretty impressive, given that all of them were things Mass Effect 1 or 2 failed at. It does mean, however, that my review score of 93% was incorrect. Mathematically, we can see that the game is really only worth 73%.

Go Shepard rescue mission on Mars, where his goal is in the Library of Protheans to find a weapon against the Reapers. Shepard has with the Reapers that threaten not only his home planet, already have their hands full, but on Mars yet another adversary appears: Cerberus, the organization that Shepard in "Mass Effect 2" brought back to life mix, apparently also. What roles are taken up by the unknown with his organization in this galactic war.

The original German version of this can be seen down below:
[quote]
Los geht Shepards Rettungsmission auf dem Mars, wo sein Ziel darin besteht in der Bibliothek der…More information.

That’s 11 of our 15 wishes fulfilled – pretty impressive, given that all of them were things Mass Effect 1 or 2 failed at. It does mean, however, that my review score of 93% was incorrect. Mathematically, we can see that the game is really only worth 73%.

I would have though that bugs and controls being flaky had more power on the score than personal wishes (check his wishes to see what I mean).

Seems like the spacebar isn't that great at doing 3 different things…once again!

It bugs me that most but not all custscenes, conversations, or area transitions make me re-activate ammo powers. Wasn't that patched by popular demand to stop doing that in ME 2?

Also - they did quite an impressive job of making your choices in the previous two games pay off and sometimes in rather huge ways. The downside of this is that some scenes will actually be rather complex series of possible segments based on choices across all 3 games - meaning they can be long and feel largely uninteractive since the decisions/actions they reflect were made by you hours ago or games ago. While cool to see things play out like that, it does mean that there can be 10 minute unpausable interactions when they do. That you can't pause them is a little frustrating when you want to maybe go to the bathroom. Still, the sum of your actions across 3 games can completely change the outcome of some missions - and sometimes the most satisfying result is dependent on a those previous actions.

Luckily there is a pretty complete only database of mass effect 2 saves if you want to see how a radically different player's universe ends up. Unfortunately those cutscenes that are the same similar enough to be uninsteresting will also be mostly unskippable and unpausable.

There seems to be somewhat more options to wander around again, which was a "good" thing in ME1, ME2 was oversimplified in this essence and I'm glad to see that this was addressed in some way. About to leave the Citadel now for the first time, check back in when I'm in sensor range again

Originally Posted by Zloth
Long cutscenes are fine by me. Heck, I did fine with 30 minute cutscenes in Xenosaga, 10 ain't nuthin'! But no pause and no skip?? That's really strange.

Ha! Your memory deceives you! I played Xenosaga again a little while ago to about half-way through (I should finish it some day ) and I'm pretty sure there are 45-minute cut-scenes. Also fine by me!

I'm completely baffled by the question why developers make cut-scenes unskippable. It's like they deliberately sabotage their own game to be more frustrating. Seeing a cut-scene once or twice is enough for me in most cases. And no pause? Really? Sometimes there are technical reasons for these, but they should be overcome. I just don't understand why anyone would do such a thing to their game.

Originally Posted by human_male
Oh they've fleshed out the Citadel, that's good news to me. I was heartbroken at what they'd done to it in ME2. And like that reviewer I'd love to see a spinoff set there.

I agree completely and very good news, indeed!! I still remember when I wandered around the Citadel in the first Mass Effect game… That was definitely its strong point.

Originally Posted by Crilloan
Those of you who have started to play it, do you play as the same proffessions as in ME2 or have you changed it?

I will always be a Vanguard! (aka didn't change it) It's still super fun to play and Nova is an awesome new skill.

Also, now you can use the weapon type you want without requiring training, so I just walk around with the Mattock (now that I found it, I used the Chackram Launcher before that -Kingdom of Amalur related DLCs-). There's too many cases where you can't charge and that's the only gun I carry to have fast skill recharge rates. So I went with range.

I played through it as a Vanguard, and I rarely used anything but a shotgun. In fact, if you equip only a shotgun and get as close as possible to 200% reduction in cooldowns, you can use charge pretty much all the time, making you nearly immortal (since it restores barriers).

Yeah I do like how they've done weapon selection this time. Fewer/lighter weapons means reduced power cooldown. Alternatively you can go loaded for bear but suffer power cooldown penalties. Also, there do seem to be quite a few weapons this time around. I've got around 30-ish to chose from not counting any DLC or bonus items; make sure you check out stores (can do so remotely from the shuttle bay) in between priority missions as new items become availible. Also, it seems that many items you missed are availible for purchase from the Spectre requisitions if you failed to grab them for free in the mission they were to be found in.

Playing infiltrator with Incisor, Mattock, and carnifex all with scope and penetration mods seems pretty nice. I do like being able to attach scopes to most weapons and the Mattock does work as a pretty nice semi-auto target rifle. The salarian gernade pistol is pretty cool too, but the time delay means its more useful for me to give to squad mates than to myself.

They really did manage to improve the equipment selection over the previous one and the differences between many of the weapons is far more significant than it was in the first game. Armor selection is also a little more fleshed out than in the second game. In addition to the 5 or so familiar sets there are also about 5-6 piecemeal sets you can mix and match. I think I ended up running with a selection of pieces that gives me a total of about %100 bonus weapon damage.